Urban history

Although there is a long tradition of historical writing, based upon the town or city as the principal unit, which goes back to classical antiquity, urban history did not emerge as a separate discipline in Britain until the 1960s. The growing interest of historians, under the influence of the social sciences, in general patterns, moved approaches to cities away from being studies of particular places, and increasing sought to site them in wider systems. An interdisciplinary approach drawing on economics, sociology and geography emerged for the study of cities after 1750, whilst historians of earlier periods tended to use more traditional methods. Both, however, have been influenced by the cultural and linguistic turn of recent decades, which has tended to reduce the confidence of urban historians in purely quantitative approaches to the city.